Yeah and no... I have been a developer for 20 years and most of my time isn't spent writing code. Most of my time is spent monitoring production, being in meetings, doing design work, doing code/spec reviews, creating tickets for infra/IT to deploy stuff...
So yeah I love AI and it really helps my personal projects. But my actual work? A little, I can work on some nice-to-have PR in the background during my meetings. I might be 20% more effective coding? Mostly because I do more of these low-hanging fruit PR like bug fixes and refactoring. The hard stuff still require thinking. But that's not even half of my time. It's fun, but not world-changing.
I have found that asking Siri to "ask ChatGPT" was enough 99% of the time for me and solved the discoverability problem that I had with my previous phones.
I think that we are now in the realm of diminishing returns regarding these chat assistants.
Not exactly, if I am thinking of leaving my job and I have responsibilities, I will not even entertain taking a leap of faith, resigning from my current position and grinding for 3 month in a super-competitive environment for 1/10 of a chance of getting a better job.
I'll talk to recruiters and interview at other companies on my spare time, as before.
What am I missing then, he talks about multi-days "campfires" contract work as a replacement for the interview process. Maybe I can get a week of holiday on a short notice but nobody will be able to do that 5 times in a month if they are actively looking.
And even if someone could get time off drive times a month to work "provisionally" at a different job, I can't imagine they'd typically be as productive hopping back and forth at either of them compared to devoting all their time to one. Sure, maybe the prospective employer would be circumspect enough to judge someone based on the correct signals of stuff like whether they're asking the right questions, showing capacity to learn and grow into the role in the long run, etc. rather than strictly judging their output, but being smarter about what you're measuring instead of blindly checking off boxes is also an option in traditional interviews, and plenty of companies still don't do that, so why would the expectation that the lazy approach of only measuring results wouldn't end to happening with this as well?
He addressed it as “job market is in such a bad shape, so perhaps even seniors won’t have any other option”, which might be true, but is sad nonetheless.
It’s awfully convenient for old heads who enjoyed the insane run up of the last decade and a half that are in plush situation to then say “oh it might suck for you now, too bad!”
Good for you to make all the hay when the sun shone? Fuck the future generation, let’s make it even harder for them with these insane interview ideas.
As a non-US AI user I do not particularly like using a US model following the recent political events, but I specifically do not want to use a model made by an ex-member of the current administration.
It is always great fun using a model via API without search/web access and quoting a recent development, being told that it must be hamfisted satire, then providing access. The reasoning traces are a delight, Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 during the administrations war with Anthropic were prime grade A kobe beef.
If they are really your only option, you can use whatever insane platform they are on long enough to forge a couple friendships, explain your stance and then quit.
If they are your friends they will understand, if not it wasn't worth the effort to begin with.
Someone does not have to understand your idiosyncrasies to be your friend.
Most people will not, in fact, understand why you are so picky about the chat platforms you are willing to use, and they will think (correctly, I would say) that you care more about your social media stances than you care about their friendship. So you will think they were not worth the effort to begin with, and they will think the same in return, but ultimately they are not restricting their potential friend pool nearly as much as you are. If it works out well for you, great, otherwise you have to be a bit more pragmatic.
My statement still stands. If you ask me to do hard drugs with you, I will say no. Does that mean I value my physical and mental integrity over our friendship? YES! I absolutely do.
It is perfectly fine to value certain things over friendship. You just have to be conscious of the friction that your convictions will cause and ask yourself whether it's worth it for you. Health is worth it. Chat apps? I don't know. If you ask me to use Signal, that seems reasonable enough and I'll do it, but if we're a group of 10 coordinating over Whatsapp and you want me to tell you whenever plans are being made, it's like, OK, but I'm doing the effort for our personal convos, can't you meet me halfway or something? That's the kind of friction you're going to deal with. Up to you.
If the content is compelling enough you will chat where you both agree to. If not it is like telling someone the only way you will talk is in the park by the chess tables.
Sure maybe you talk to them by chess tables sometimes, but if they won't meet you for coffee then they aren't your friends, just chess table acquaitances.
Real example: My friend group has a hiking group on WhatsApp and there is one friend who is not on it. One person will propose a hike, and will keep messaging the group with information about it. Someone then has to message that other friend and tell them about it, every time there is a slight adjustment to plans.
Let's say you are my friend, and Bob is arranging a hike for 10am on Saturday. You usually come on the hike so I let you know. Even though all the details are on the group, you ask me all the questions and I have to fill you in. Then on the morning of the hike Darcy's car breaks down and the time gets rearranged from 10am to 11am, so then I have to tell you that as well because you aren't on the group chat, and suddenly I feel like I am becoming your PA (and if I forget to tell you the time has changed then suddenly it's my fault - even though i'm not arranging the damn hike and you could have been on the group in the first place you just refuse).
Some of my best friends decided to quit certain platforms like Facebook and yes, Whatsapp too (two people). I definitely understood. I even have signal and telegram installed. But I never remember to check them. It's just not practical.
I guess because Whatsapp provides a unified and standard way to communicate between people on different provider networks / countries for free? You get groups, text/images/location sharing, video/audio calls, cross-countries, that works very reliably, and you only need internet (which can be found almost anywhere even if that's just wifi).
MMS still don't work reliably for me (lost a message just last week that someone swear to have sent). And for a long time they were not free as well.
I'm not actually suggesting using MMS. I just wanted to illustrate that we've had instant communication technology (even "rich" multi-media) long before Whatsapp etc. Why didn't the providers of that technology (telecom companies) become Meta?
The difference is that MMS/SMS is standardized and agnostic to the client interface. While WhatsApp is proprietary and monopolizes the client.
We could easily have had a "internet direct message" standard implementing most of WhatsApps features. (Wait... Isn't that SMTP?)
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but what does WhatsApp bring that let's say email++ does not have?
My setup: a laptop with Arch Linux that I set up 3 years ago.
I didn't touch the daemons/services, so it's all the basic stuff auto-maintained and auto-upgraded by arch linux. It just works (I only installed the services I needed).
But for the user facing parts, I am using my own forks of the suckless tools: dwm (Windows manager), st (terminal), slock (screen locking)
It took me a little while to set it up to my liking, but I haven't had to change anything to my workflow, it just works. It's very barebone, but with vscode and a browser, I have all I need.
And I only need to run pacman -Suy once in a while.
That's not my experience at all. A few years ago I would have been looking for the unknown chinese brands that could provide me with a gear that was "good enough". Now I will not even consider buying anything that is not from the top 5 brands for each thing. I have been burned too many time by products that were _almost_ as good, but not quite, and broke quickly. My branded gear is usually lasting forever (lenovo laptop, bose headset, roomba cleaner, instapot) as long as I buy on the medium/high-end end of the spectrum.
The thing is that as it is said over and over in this thread, you cannot trust reviews, and I would add that you cannot trust most of the smaller blogs/review websites because most would say anything about a product as long as they are paid.
If I buy the new Sony noise cancelling headsets, I know I will not get disappointed: it is a reputable brand, and it is the high-end of the range. This strategy is not perfect, far from it, and some brand are taking advantage of it. In that case, vote with your wallet. You can't really do that with no-name brands.
I'm not saying brands are not an indicator. Indeed, if I'm going to buy a USB-C cable, I'm going to use it as a filter.
I'm saying brand loyalty has lost its power now.
Sony is a good example. You say it's a reputable brand, yet sometimes they just lose it do something absolutely terrible. The first one that comes to mind is infecting willingly their customers with a rootkit in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), but it's just because I don't follow up on those things as much. I'm sure there are ones in the last 5 years, although with PR firms doing their job as well as they do now, a quick google search will seldom return anything.
Companies don't have a customer first mentality anymore.
Loyalty doesn't mean anything for them, and so you being loyal to them makes no sense.
And it does mean a more complicated world, because you constantly have to reassess where to buy from.
I've found a lot of value in niche brands. For instance the Finnish outdoor/military/surplus store Varusteleka have some quite good own-brand products.
Their Särmä-brand "common jeans" are just that; classic straight cut jeans with a medium waist, no stone-washing or other artificial wear, and a little bit of stretch for comfort. For someone like me who has large thighs from lifting weights, there are many otherwise nice pants I just can't wear, but these are perfect. Most brands these days have 5 different kinds of slim/skinny fit, and 1 straight fit if you're lucky.
Their "tactical jeans" are even better, with roughly the same cut and the addition of a crotch gusset for mobility and discreet extra pockets. There's a bit of polyester in the fabric for durability and a bit more stretch too. They're literally as comfortable as sweat pants, it's uncanny. If they last as long as promised, I doubt I will ever buy other jeans again.
Overall, I would say don't trust brands, trust quality, and don't trust reviews on big sites like Amazon.
So yeah I love AI and it really helps my personal projects. But my actual work? A little, I can work on some nice-to-have PR in the background during my meetings. I might be 20% more effective coding? Mostly because I do more of these low-hanging fruit PR like bug fixes and refactoring. The hard stuff still require thinking. But that's not even half of my time. It's fun, but not world-changing.